[rkward-devel] Rinside

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Wednesday 07 December 2011, meik michalke wrote:
> i was just hinted to this:
>  o http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2011/03/25/#rinside_and_qt
>  o http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rinside.html
> 
> looks like an interesting package ;-)

yes, Rinside is an interesting package, and if it had been around earlier, we 
would probably have used it in RKWard at some point of time. However, 
actually, the main sources of complexity in the R backend are communication 
with the frontend, and providing a decent console emulation (which is much 
easier said than done; see comments in rkrbackend.cpp). Neither is addressed 
by Rinside. We do have a use for some of the other bits in Rinside, however 
these are not too complex in the first place, and replacing them with Rinside 
does not look like it would be worth the trouble (if possible at all).

Similar things can be said about Rcpp. Much of what this (nice!) package does 
is mostly orthogonal to what needs to be done in the RKWard backend (*). Once 
again, if the package had been around earlier, RKWard would probably make use 
of (parts of) it. However, switching to it now, would be a lot of work for 
little gain.

Regards
Thomas

(*) The primary focus of Rcpp is on working on R data directly in C++. 
However, in RKWard, the frontend runs in a different process (and 
asynchronously), which renders most of this moot. Also, one design aspect of 
RKWard is "all relevant actions should be implemented as R code." Thus we have 
comparatively little use for direct manipulation of data in C++ in the first 
place.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/rkward-devel/attachments/20111208/2566adda/attachment.sig>